The gratuitous destruction of dozens
of Palestinian shops in the West Bank village of Nazlat Issa by
Israeli army bulldozers on January 21 is the latest step in the
Sharon governments drive to eliminate even a semblance of
Palestinian national existence. That aim was driven home by the
massive Zionist military operation last springcarried out
with a green light from the Israeli rulers patrons in Washingtonwhich
was marked by the army massacre in the Jenin refugee camp and
the devastation of homes, hospitals, schools and water and sewage
treatment systems in other West Bank cities and towns. Under cover
of the coming U.S.-led war against Iraq, Israels rulers
could well carry out the genocidal transfer program
openly advocated by many of Sharons political allies, i.e.,
the forcible expulsion of the Palestinian masses from Greater
Israel.

As we wrote in a Spartacist League statement
in response to the Jenin massacre (WV No. 778, 5 April
2002): The international working class must urgently rally
to the defense of the Palestinian people against the Zionist military
terror machine. Defend the Palestinian people! All Israeli
troops, settlers out of the Occupied Territories! All U.S./UN
imperialist forces out of the Near East! For a socialist federation
of the Near East!

The coming U.S.-led war against Iraq
could well ignite renewed explosions of social turmoil in the
Arab countries. But if such struggles are to aid the liberation
of the Palestinians, the Arab workers, the oppressed women and
myriad national and religious minorities, what is required is
the forging of internationalist Marxist workers parties implacably
opposed to any reliance on the Arab bourgeois regimes or one or
another imperialist agency. Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat is
today hounded by the Zionist rulers, imprisoned in the bombed-out
remnants of his Ramallah headquarters. But it is precisely the
petty-bourgeois nationalist politics of Arafats Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) that has helped bring the Palestinians
to this tragic impasse.

The strategy of armed struggle
pursued by the PLO in the 1960s and 70s was never aimed
at defeating the overwhelmingly more powerful Zionist state but
rather at pressuring the Arab regimes to take up the cause of
Arab unity against Israel. Instead, the Arab capitalist
states moved to bloodily repress Palestinian militants, with Jordans
King Hussein slaughtering more than 10,000 PLO fighters in the
infamous Black September massacre in 1970 and tens
of thousands more killed later in Lebanon. The PLOs pursuit
of the imperialists culminated in the 1993 Oslo accord, granting
Arafat the nominal autonomy of a handful of Palestinian ghettos
in the Occupied Territories which were then increasingly sealed
off and subjected to starvation blockades by the Zionist occupation
forces. In despair, the Palestinians, once among the most cosmopolitan
peoples of the Near East, have increasingly turned to Islamic
fundamentalists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, vile anti-Semitic
and anti-Christian religious bigots who seek to enslave women
and extirpate any manifestation of social progress.

Yet one self-styled Marxist group, the
League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP), urges Palestinian militants
to recycle the petty-bourgeois nationalist politics whose suicidal
logic is today manifest. The LRP claims to offer a proletarian
perspective, raising the call for a socialist federation of the
Near East and declaring: The road to Palestinian freedom
really begins with unchaining the Arab working classes of the
region from their bourgeois leaders and opening a revolutionary
struggle against their neo-colonial Arab rulers (Proletarian
Revolution, Spring 2002). But everything the LRP stands for
is in flat contradiction to these words.

LRP: National Unity vs. Class Unity

Sneeringly dismissing Spartacist
fantasies of an Arab/Hebrew workers revolution,
the LRP rejects out of hand any possibility of winning the Hebrew
workers to the cause of socialist revolution. Yet there can be
no revolutionary perspective in the Near East without taking into
account the proletariat of Israel, the most technologically advanced
and militarily powerful country in the region. The Zionist state
is armed to the teeth, including with a sizable nuclear arsenal
which it would willingly use to irradiate every Arab city if it
perceived a threat to its existence. If the Zionist citadel is
not cracked from within through workers revolution, all talk of
national justice is simply empty rhetoric that does nothing to
advance the cause of the Palestinians. But there is no way the
Hebrew workers will be won to the need for common class struggle
against the Israeli capitalist rulers if their own right to a
national existence is threatened.

Moreover, if the working masses of the
Arab countries are to be won to the communist program, it is necessary
to directly confront the false consciousness that binds them to
their oppressors. That means defending the rights of the Kurds
in Iraq and Syria, the Berbers in Algeria and Morocco, the Copts
in Egypt. It means fighting against the horrid oppression of women,
symbolized by the veil and purdah (seclusion), that is
enforced by Islamic reactionaries as well as by secular
nationalist regimes. And it means combatting the anti-Semitism
propagated by the Arab rulers and Islamists, which is one of the
main things poisoning the consciousness of the Arab proletariat.

But the LRP does none of these things.
Its article does not so much as mention, much less defend, the
rights of non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities or of women in the
Arab countries. It accepts the lie propagated by Arab nationalists,
Islamic fundamentalists and, indeed, the Zionists that the Hebrew-speaking
people as a whole are and will always be wedded to Zionist chauvinism.
Instead, the LRP enthuses over nationalist armed struggle
against Israel (not even acknowledging Israels stockpile
of nuclear weapons) and seeks only to give such struggle a more
mass and militant rendering. The LRP declares:

To aid the Palestinians and expose
the present illusions in Arafat and the Arab rulers, proletarian
revolutionaries demand of them: provide arms to the masses!...

The street protests in support
of the intifada are vital, but they need to be joined by massive
general strikes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon,
and the other countries of the Middle East demanding arms for
the Palestinians.

This is the height of nationalist cretinism.
The LRP calls for a general strike, which poses the question of
which class shall rule. But the LRPs purpose is not
to sweep away the neocolonial Arab bourgeoisies but rather to
chain proletarian struggle to the yoke of national unity
with those bourgeoisies. In its headline, the LRP calls For
Arab Workers Revolutionnot to smash the Arab
capitalist states but To Smash Israeli/U.S. Terror!

The Arab regimes that the LRP calls on
to aid the Palestinians are themselves responsible for the slaughter
of some 50,000 Palestinians between 1967 and 1977. Yet,
in pursuit of the treacherous fiction of united Arab mass
struggle, the LRP cannot even bring itself to denounce the
blood-drenched, U.S.-backed Hashemite monarchy for the 1970 massacre
in Jordan. Instead they blame the Israelis for the Black
September events of 1970 when the Mossad, Israels
CIA, helped to prop up Jordans monarchy against a Palestinian
uprising.

Any socialist worth his salt solidarizes
with the Palestinians who defend themselves against the murderous
Zionist occupation forces in Gaza and the West Bankthe Israeli
army and its fascistic settler auxiliaries. But if the last two
years have demonstrated anything, it is that the Palestinians
cannot prevail in a purely military confrontation with the Israeli
state. And today much of the Palestinian armed struggle
consists of indiscriminate terrorist attacks against anyone who
happens to be in an Israeli shopping mall or disco. Those who
perpetrate such criminal acts, deeming every Israeli to be the
enemy, mirror the chauvinist mindset of the Zionist
rulers themselves.

The mass protests in the Arab countries
last spring were an expression of solidarity with the besieged
Palestinians and a measure of the outrage of the Arab masses against
their own rulers. But these demonstrations were shot through with
anti-Semitism and largely dominated by Islamic fundamentalists.
The LRP barely acknowledges this danger, while noting that some
Arab workers have turned to reactionary clerical leaders,
another dead end.

Marxists seek to shift the axis of struggle
from Israeli against Arab to class against class. We stand with
Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who wrote: Marxism cannot be
reconciled with nationalism. Be it even of the most just,
purest, most refined and civilised brand. In place
of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism
(Critical Remarks on the National Question, 1913).

Instead of seeking to win the proletariat
to a political perspective of class independence, the LRP enthuses
over the need for unity of all Palestinians in the struggle
and united Arab mass struggle. This is a recipe for
unity of Arab workers and peasants with the oil sheiks and bonapartist
despots, for unity of leftist Palestinian militants with the cutthroat
reactionaries of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And it serves the purpose
of the Arab rulers, who have long played on the need for unity
against the Zionist entity in order to deflect the
anger of those they oppress toward an external enemy.

Is All of the U.S. Occupied
Territory?

The LRP explicitly denies the national
rights of the Hebrew-speaking people and embraces the call of
radical Arab nationalists and Islamists: All Israel is Occupied
Territory! In polemicizing against the LRPs
line, we wrote (Zionist Bloodbath in Jenin, WV
No. 779, 19 April 2002):

The doctrine that an oppressor
nation forfeits its right to self-determination has nothing in
common with socialism and democracy; it is the ideology of genocidal
irredentism. The Zionist state was created by crushing the national
rights of the Palestinians. But securing national justice for
the Palestinians does not mean reversing the terms of oppression
and denying the democratic rights of the Hebrew-speaking people.
Basic to the Leninist position on the national questionthe
only consistently democratic positionis that all nations
have a right to self-determination.

In response, the LRP screamed that we
are in a word, Zionists and insisted that Leninists
unhesitatingly support the rights of the oppressed over the oppressors
(Proletarian Revolution, Spring 2002). Leninists unhesitatingly
defend small, dependent nations in a military conflict with imperialist
countries. And we unhesitatingly oppose every manifestation of
oppression and discriminationbe it national, racial, sexual
or religious. But we do not thereby elevate the oppressed to the
pantheon of progressive peoples who have rights as
opposed to reactionary peoples who have none. If all
of Israel is occupied territory, what does that make
of the U.S.? The Zionists atrocities pale in comparison
to the brutality and butchery with which Americas founders
and rulers wiped out entire indigenous peoples. Why doesnt
the LRP raise the call All of the United States is Occupied
Territory!?

The LRP would do well to note what Lenin
actually wrote in his 1914 pamphlet, The Right of Nations to
Self-Determination, where he explained that the proletariat
confines itself, so to speak, to the negative demand for recognition
of the right to self-determination, without giving guarantees
to any nation, and without undertaking to give anything
at the expense of another nation. This was the policy
pursued by Lenin both before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
that smashed the tsarist prison house of peoples. Lenins
aim was to take the national question off the agenda in order
to bring the class question to the fore. He fought indefatigably
against any manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism while defending
the rights of all nations to self-determinationi.e.,
to establish their own statesincluding under proletarian
rule.

Normally, the right of self-determination
of an oppressor nation is a moot point. But in cases of geographically
interpenetrated peoplesas in Israel/ Palestine, where
Palestinian Arabs and Hebrew-speaking Israelis live in and lay
claim to the same small sliver of landunder capitalism the
exercise of national self-determination by either of the populations
will necessarily be at the expense of the other. In such cases,
a democratic solution to the national question can only come about
through socialist revolution, because only the proletariat in
power has an interest in resolving national antagonisms and can
lay the material basis for the economic development of all peoples,
leading to the establishment of a global communist society.

Look for example at how the Bolsheviks
dealt with the Caucasus, a patchwork of nationalities and pre-national
groupings which had been riven by interethnic conflicts for centuries,
after the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks not only granted
the various nations in the region the right to form their own
independent states but also developed a range of administrative
solutions to allow even tiny ethnic groupings a measure of local
autonomy. Thus the workers revolution put a stop to ethnic warfare.
Contrast this with the LRP, which offers the Hebrew-speaking people
only the following right even within the framework
of proletarian state power: Israelis unwilling to live in
a Palestinian workers state will have the right to leave.

In an attempt to defend the indefensible,
the LRP resorts to lies and distortions. In the latest issue of
Proletarian Revolution (Fall 2002), the LRP asserts that
we oppose the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Continuing
a theme from its earlier article, it also equates the Hebrew-speaking
nation with the Zionist state in order to claim
that we defend the preservation of Israel. Before
exposing these lies, it is necessary to first untangle the LRPs
deliberate confusionism. For Marxists, a nation is a people with
a common language, culture and political economy; a state is an
instrument of organized violencecentrally the army, police
and prisonsthrough which a particular class maintains its
rule. The Israeli capitalist state is the enemy not only of the
Palestinians but above all of the workers of Israel, Hebrew or
Arab. In the very article in WV No. 779 which the LRP attacks,
we wrote:

The national emancipation of the
Palestiniansincluding the right of all refugees and their
descendants to return to their homelandnecessarily entails
workers revolutions to sweep away the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
and the bloody Baathist bonapartists in Syria, to bring
down the capitalist rulers of Lebanon and to shatter the Zionist
state, establishing a socialist federation of the Near East.
[emphases added]

Leninism vs. Petty-Bourgeois Leftism

We take our stand with the Palestinian
Trotskyists of the 1940s, who fought against all odds to transcend
the nationalist conflict and unite Arab and Hebrew workers in
common struggle. They opposed the Zionist partition of Palestine
and proclaimed at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War: The
only way to peace between the two peoples of this country is turning
the guns against the instigators of murder in both camps
(Against the Stream, reprinted in Fourth International,
May 1948; emphasis in original). At the same time, the Trotskyists
were sober about the enormous obstacles to united revolutionary
struggle by Arab and Hebrew-speaking workers. The 1947 Draft
Theses on the Jewish Question, which was adopted by the
International Secretariat of the Fourth International in the wake
of big strikes by Arab and Jewish government and oil refinery
workers, stated:

At the present stage, large-scale
unity between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine is unrealizable;
only on a very limited scale and to the extent that a section
of the Jewish workers is employed outside the closed
Jewish economy, has it been possible for Jewish-Arab strikes such
as those of the past year to occur. But this does not mean that
such unity is excluded for all time. [emphasis in original]

More than five decades of Zionist oppression
and privation have deeply exacerbated differences between Hebrew
and Arab workers, while hardening nationalist antagonisms on both
sides. These hatreds have grown particularly acute in the face
of more than two years of unremitting Zionist terror.

We have no illusion that it will be easy
to shatter the chauvinist consensus that currently binds the Hebrew
proletariat to its capitalist exploiters. In all likelihood, it
will take great historic events, like a victorious workers revolution
in one of the Arab countries, to inspire Israeli workers on the
road of revolutionary struggle against the Zionist bourgeoisie.

When we attacked the LRP for writing
off the whole of the Hebrew-speaking working class as a labor
aristocracy, they admitted to grains of truth
in our description of class and other social divisions in Israeli
society. At the same time, they note that Israeli workers
enjoy a tremendous privilege over Palestinian workers and
that their elevated standard of living serves to tie large
numbers of Israeli workers to supporting the Israeli state.
There is, to use the LRPs expression, a grain of truth
in this statement.

But to conclude from this, as does the
LRP, that a majority of Israeli workers can be expected
to remain loyal to the continued existence of Israel is
to deny the possibility of making the proletariat conscious of
its historic task as the gravedigger of the capitalist system.
Israel is no exception to the rule that the interests of capital
and labor are irreconcilably counterposed and that the contradictions
of capitalism necessarily engender class struggle. In essence,
the LRPs hostility toward the Hebrew workers mirrors the
white skin privilege line pushed by Third World nationalists
and sections of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s.
They argued that workers in the imperialist countries, and especially
white workers in the U.S., had been bought off by
imperialism and were thus incapable of making a socialist revolution.

From its inception, the LRP has been
defined not by a proletariani.e., Trotskyistprogram
but by the prevailing winds of petty-bourgeois radicalism. The
LRP is a direct political heir of Max Shachtman, who led a split
from the American Trotskyist movement in 1940. Succumbing to anti-Communist
hysteria among radical intellectuals over the 1939 Hitler-Stalin
pact and the Soviet invasion of capitalist Finland and Poland
at the outbreak of World War II, Shachtman repudiated the Trotskyist
call for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union. The
LRP has throughout its existence followed in Shachtmans
footsteps, joining the imperialists in denouncing the Soviet intervention
against CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in the
1980s and backing Boris Yeltsin in his counterrevolutionary power
grab in 1991, which led to the final undoing of the October Revolution.

It was the destruction of the Soviet
Union that prepared the way for the current dire situation facing
the Palestinians. The Soviet Union provided a counterweight to
U.S. imperialism, allowing petty-bourgeois nationalists like the
PLO to jockey for support between the U.S. and the USSR. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, this leverage was lostas
well as considerable amounts of financial and military supportand
a significantly weakened PLO accepted a sham autonomy,
effectively policing the Palestinian masses on behalf of the Israeli
rulers. The 1993 accord laid the basis for further devastating
the economy of the Occupied Territories, sealing off tens of thousands
of workers from their jobs in Israel, while leading to a massive
expansion of Zionist settlements and the virtual imprisonment
of the entire Palestinian population in isolated, besieged ghettos.
This is what the democratic counterrevolution cheered
on by the LRP has meant for the Palestinian people.

A workers revolution in one of the Arab
countries, proclaiming the internationalist unity of all the working
people, would have an enormous impact on the Hebrew-speaking workers
of Israel. But if Arab, Persian and Kurdish workers are to break
the chains of exploitation and oppression, they must be broken
from all variants of nationalism and won to a relentless struggle
to extirpate the influence of the Islamic fundamentalists who
now pose as the enemies of Zionism and imperialism. Workers of
the Near East have a rich tradition of revolutionary struggle.
We look to the legacy of the multinational Iranian proletariat
that struggled for power in 1953, of the Arab and Kurdish Iraqi
workers who sought to make a socialist revolution five years later.
To seize on such opportunities when they arise, and to lead them
to victory, requires above all the construction of internationalist
workers parties, sections of a reforged Fourth International,
in opposition to Zionism, Arab nationalism and all manner of religious
fundamentalism.